


Leaving Silicon Valley

by maracolleenbanks



Series: Coming to Pandemonium [2]
Category: Dreamwalkers Universe
Genre: Gen, San Francisco Bay Area
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 08:50:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15336249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maracolleenbanks/pseuds/maracolleenbanks





	Leaving Silicon Valley

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Dreamwalkers Universe](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/404346) by Siren Tycho and Mara Colleen Banks. 



Sand Hill Road was a plane of beige plastic. Taupe is the word Linda, the designer at his last startup, would have used, but Micael had never paid much attention to design. His color vocabulary extended to no more than ten words. One of them was beige. 

Beige had been a good color, a safe color. It had followed him through his life like a faithful dog, unnoticed unless it was tripped over or got something greasy spilled on it. Almost everything in Micael’s wardrobe had some beige in it. Now beige spread out before him, his life in clothes, flashing in the desert sun before his eyes, melted down into a perfectly uniform polyester sheet that stretched from one horizon to the other. 

This must be my punishment, he thought, my special hell. 

He had taken design for granted. He had failed to consider it adequately in his presentations before the venture capitalists. He hadn’t paid Linda enough money. Now he was a ghost, and this would be his hell forever. 

The sun was directly overhead. He waited for what felt like days, but it didn’t move. He knew all of the office buildings on Sand Hill Road. He had been in and out of all of them begging the venture capitalists for money, and none of the buildings around him were anything like the ones he had known. They had no windows or doors. They were solid glass, mirrored when you looked at them from the right angle. He had spent, all told, ten solid months on that street, but with the sun locked in place at high noon, his sense of direction was utterly shot. 

He picked a direction and walked. A street sign on every block reminded him that he was still on Sand Hill Road. In each building, a man in a blue shirt waved to him with a toothy grin that reached his eyes only just enough to fake happiness for the company portrait. Micael recognized none of them but waved back on the off chance that he wasn’t alone. The rhythm of their waving didn’t change, so he stuffed his hands into his beige pockets and focused on the sidewalk spooling out in front of him, hoping that he was walking in the direction of a better hell. 

Instead, he reached the San Francisco Bay. The bay was shallow on that edge. In life, it had sometimes smelled sulfurous when the wind came from the wrong direction, but there was no wind in this place. The flat beige world ended sharply and became a silver mirror that rippled around gray and white water birds that picked through the water on car antennae legs.

The gray birds were herons, apparently. He remembered that now. He had once known the names of all birds and what it meant when they flew overhead, he remembered. It took him long moments to remember to call the white birds cranes. He had known them once in a life long before he moved to Silicon Valley, but he had to reach back into the dusty corners of his vault of lives to find the elegant white birds. 

Herons were closer, though. He had a sister in this lifetime who loved the birds. She wrote poetry about them and always told him to pay attention to the place where a heron looked. 

Micael stepped off the sidewalk, slashed his way through the tall marsh grass, and waded into the bay. The water barely reached the tops of his shoes, but the mud was gray and fine and tugged at him. He tired quickly walking that way, but he refused to give up his shoes, and he was determined to find a heron and walk in whatever direction it looked, even if it meant walking across the sucking bay. 

The birds paid no more attention to him than the men in the blue shirts had done, and he was convinced before he’d walked very far that they were props. No matter. Maybe this was a test to see if he had been a good and loving brother and paid attention his sister. 

Only when he got five or ten feet from a heron did he change his mind. The bird had its beak in its back and had looked at Micael with a lazy eye. Then it suddenly shook itself and uncurled its neck and looked at him. Its beady black eyes stared at him with an intense attention. Micael realized that no one had looked at him that intently since—Had he been a monk during the reign of Henry VIII?

“Go where they look,” his sister had said. 

He was certain she said that. It was that certainty that kept him from feeling foolish for standing in the middle of the bay, muddy, wet, and engaged in a staring contest with a tall gray bird. 

She never said what to do if it wouldn’t look anywhere but at you, he thought. Why am I here?

The bird blinked, as if startled by his unspoken question, and went back to its nap. 

Why am I here? He repeated to himself. He had never asked that question before. In life, Silicon Valley had seemed as hard to leave as Sand Hill Road was in death. Yet, he had worked so hard to stay there, cramming his tall frame into a twin bed specially shortened to fit into an apartment the size of an RV, making his twice-yearly pilgrimages to Sand Hill Road to prostrate himself before the men in blue shirts and beg for a dispensation.

When he was alive, he always had a ready answer for anyone who asked him why he lived the way he did. Usually, that person was his mother who didn’t understand why he didn’t move back home and marry a girl with a nice tan and get a house on the beach and a job programming explosions in Hollywood. He had repeated the same lines to her so many times he couldn’t remember them now. Or, maybe that knowledge was being crowded out by all of the other things he’d known in a life before his last one, like the way ancient castle walls smelled in the rain, the howl of wolves outside the palisades, the rage of a newborn daughter’s first cry.

He had lived before, and he was certain he’d never once gotten stuck haunting somewhere he didn’t want to be. (He had haunted several beer halls in Germany in his 20s, but that was different.) Was there a script in death, too, and he’d forgotten the words? Would the script come back to him eventually, dissolved in the steady drip of things he was increasingly knowing, knowing, knowing? 

No, all he really needed to do was want to leave, admit that he was giving up. Hadn’t he done that already? He was still holding the gun—a spiritual version of the gun that ended him, technically. The physical one was back in his apartment next to his head, waiting for a police detective to put her gloves on and pick it up off the floor. 

Why did he keep the gun? Was it evidence? He had spent the last hundred dollars from his last funding round on that gun. There would be no more funding after a purchase like that with company funds. There would be no more funding, anyway.

He dropped the gun into the bay, and it fell barrel down into the mud. Herons and cranes rose on improbably long wings and flew over his head. Micael followed them with his eyes until he saw, back the way he came, the buildings of Sand Hill Road catch the light off the bay, erasing the beige plane in a searing white intensity that rivaled the sun. The ripples of the fall shimmered in the California sun, spreading out to either shore, undiminished by distance until the bay glistened like a shattered mirror giving way in cracks of light until the cracks became the whole and nothing but light remained. 

He covered his face with his arm and squinted, opening his eyes just enough to see where he was going as he retraced his steps through the mud, walking into the light.


End file.
